You're listening to Away with Words, the Shell About Language, and how we use it.

I'm Grant Barrett.

And I'm Martha Barnett.

Benjamin Dreyer is Vice President, Executive Managing Editor and Copy Chief for Random House.

And now he is the author of a highly opinionated book about language, called

Dreyer's English, an utterly correct guide to clarity in style, which kind of gives you a sense of the tone right there.

He's being ironic right? Yes yes and one of the things he does is to challenge

readers to go a whole week without writing the following words, very, rather, really, quite,

actually, surely, just in the sense of merely, so in the sense of extremely, and pretty pretty as in pretty pedantic.

And he also throws in the phrases of course and in fact and that said and he says

if you can purge from your prose what he calls these wan intensifiers and throat

clearer then you will at the end of that week be a considerably better writer than you were at the

beginning so I thought you know I've heard that kind of advice before,

but he was so emphatic about it that I thought,

well, I'm going to try that with my own writing.

How long did you last?

An hour? Very good question because it was rough and so what I

decided to do was every time I caught myself using a just or an actual

These WAN intensifiers.

What a great way to put it.

Yes.

I made a promise to myself that any time I used one of those,

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